They discover the first giant dinosaur that existed on Earth
Argentine researchers have found the fossils of this new species that has been baptized with the name of 'Ingentia prima' ("The first giant").
To understand the scope of this news, perhaps the most important so far this year in the world of paleontology, the first thing to remember is that dinosaurs appeared in the Secondary or Mesozoic Era, which began 252 million years ago and it extended 186 million years, and that said era was divided into three periods: Triassic, Jurassic and, finally, Cretaceous. When we talk about dinosaurs, we tend to imagine giants like tyrannosaurs and tricerátops or supergiants like sauropods - popularly known as "long-necked" - but none of them existed even in the Triassic - in fact, it was thought that there had been no dinosaurs giants in that first period of the Mesozoic, but their origins had been in the Jurassic.
Now it has just been discovered that we were wrong, that these colossal animals inhabited the Earth 30 million years earlier than we supposed, and all this thanks to the discovery made by a team of Argentine researchers at the Balde de Leyes deposit, located in the southeast of the province of San Juan. There they have found the fossils of a specimen that exceeds three times the size of the largest Triassic dinosaurs that were known until now, as it had a body mass of about ten tons. They have baptized it with the name of Ingentia prima ("The first giant"), and inhabited the Earth more than 200 million years ago.
The study has been published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, and its main author has been Dr. Cecilia Apaldetti, who is a researcher at the Institute and Museum of Natural Sciences (IMCN) of the Faculty of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of the National University of San Juan and CONICET.
"Before this discovery, it was considered that gigantism had emerged during the Jurassic period, about 180 million years ago, but Ingentia prima lived at the end of the Triassic, between 210 and 205 million years ago," said Apaldetti, according to a press release made public by the National University of San Juan.
The origin of gigantism
The 10 tons that the Ingentia prima weighed seem very few in comparison with the almost 70 of the titanosaurios (that could get to measure about 16 meters of height and whose length could reach the 37 meters), own of the Cretácico, but it laid the foundations of the gigantism among the dinosaurs. Apaldetti explains: "This is a true giant, especially for that moment of evolution, in which most of the animals that coexisted did not exceed two meters in height and the heaviest came, at most, to the three tons. " "That's why we see the origin of gigantism in Ingentia prima, the first steps that, more than 100 million years later, sauropods of up to 70 tons, such as Argentinosaurus or Patagotitan, from southern Argentina, will come into being," he adds.
The Ingentia prima was an herbivore that, according to the Argentine researcher explained to the Clarín newspaper, "knew how to have the intelligence to grow fast, like no other dinosaur, and also as a defense strategy to not be so vulnerable to the carnivores, the ancestors of the crocodiles, which were the patterns of the time ".